The advances and reduced costs of network connected mobile devices in recent years have brought a dramatic change in user behavior. The typical user owns multiple personal devices ranging from desktop and laptop computers, notebooks, tablets, smart phones and electronic books. Consequently, there is a growing need to share data among devices, as well as to guarantee its availability despite the fact that devices may be turned off, disconnected and replaced. The penetration of such technology is rapidly increasing in organizations of all sizes. As a result, users are mixing enterprise files, documents and applications together with their personal media.
To this end, the use of cloud-based storage for sharing information between different devices and also among group of users has become a standard. Many consumer commercial offerings such as Dropbox, Box, iCloud, Google Drive and Sugarsync have gained widespread user popularity.
These services offer cloud-based storage that is connected to the devices through apps or through a browser interface. The apps present to the user a directory structure of files organized in folders similar to the appearance of native application such as MS Explorer. In certain operating systems (Windows, Apple OS X) the folder are accessed via the native file browser application. The folders on the device are synchronized with the storage on the cloud and therefore maintain a coherent file and directory state and view across all devices. In certain cases (e.g. Sugarsync) the files are uploaded to the cloud but are not necessarily automatically synchronized to all devices.
In addition to the web-storage services, there is a parallel trend of uploading unstructured data, in particular company documents, to SaaS (Software as a Service) services. New cloud-based enterprise application such as Salesforce.com, Success Factors, and Box, and consumer-based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail, are essentially independent document repositories. These new services have caused a major migration of documents from the corporate storage to web-based SaaS.
FIG. 1 illustrates enterprise based services 20 such as Salesforce 21, Jive 23 and Box 24 and others (such as 22), consumer based services 10 such as Dropbox 13, Gmail 11 and others 12, that are accessed by an enterprise system 30 that includes a database 31, access control, DLP (Data Loss Prevention), DMS (Document Management Service) and analytics modules 32-35.
This trend has caused several major problems.                a. The cloud storage resides outside the enterprise storage and management systems. It is impossible for IT managers to understand what type of data is placed in these services, track the content evolution/changes, police the access and usage of the content and prevent misplacement, duplication and unauthorized access. There may be certain organizational data that is not allowed on some or all of these services. Finally, the consumer-oriented services are easy to break-in using Phishing or password breaking, and have sharing capabilities that may cause enterprise data to be shared by mistake with unauthorized parties (inside or outside the organization).        b. Cloud storage is usually implemented as a data center level storage and therefore is expensive compared to the on-device storage. 2011 technology and prices have resulted in a 1 TB of storage for a typical home entertainment system or desktop computer, and 32 GB for a typical smart phone or a tablet. Similarly, within organizations, the data owned and shared by an employee within organization file systems and current content management systems offer even larger amounts of storage. In comparison popular cloud storage services typically offer only 2-5 GB of storage for free. Consequently, there are several orders of magnitude difference between the quantity of storage that is used and addressed by the user and the reasonably priced cloud storage solution that can be offered to that user. Even when the user does not wish to access all addressable storage but only “relevant” topical material, the current solutions are static and manual. The user needs to select which file he wants to share and move them to the cloud storage directory. This may lead to situation that the data the user would like to access is not available online.        